What caused this jagged effect in wing movement?

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Chris Summers

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Chris Summers
Trying to figure out what happened here with the hummingbird's wings. This was shot with my R6 MKII and a Tamron 150-600mm at about 500mm. At first I wondered about shutter roll but it's not what that looks like.

2024-057-043 Hummingbirdsl-2.jpg
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Hmmm. I agree it doesn't look like normal e-shutter readout lag, but I can't think of anything else that could cause that. In terms of my understanding of how e-shutter works, writing out lines of data, the horizontal lines on the left wing would seem to indicate that still might be the cause.
 
I was going to suggest looking in DP Review, but...ah, never mind 🤣
 
Did you use any type of masking or 3rd party sharpening, etc apps? I see odd larger halos behind the feet and tail.
 
Looks like either a processing artifact or a potential sensor read issue. It's not just the wings for me but throughout the body of the hummingbird, with the difference being that the wings are moving far more than the body (the feeder looks OK). Rolling shutter is a sweep across the sensor whereas this looks like parallel lines across the shutter were read milli/micro-seconds apart in an "every-other" manner and not swept top to bottom. Anything that didn't move is fine, anything that did move is off.

I don't think that would occur with the sharpening tools I know, they would just enhance the effect there. Was this part of a longer burst, maybe at the end as the buffer filled? It's like this particular read got slowed down ever so slightly - a glitch in the matrix more than an actual issue. If it was a burst is there any evidence in the images immediately before and after?
 
Interesting. What were your ISO and shutter speed settings? Was this all manual or an automatic mode?

I’ve seen some weird sensor lag issues with some long exposures of night sky shots, where there were triangular artifacts from what was probably a satellite or meteor.
 
Here is a .dng file exported as a jpg with only some basic image edits like cropping, exposure, etc. Not processed in any other program.
1/6400 sec at f/6.3 and ISP 12800. Most likely electronic first curtain shutter. You can see the jagged edges on the wings.
hummingbird.jpg
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Is that Tamron 150-600mm actually working for you on the R6mkII?

I though there were supposed to be some auto focus incompatibilities with that lens on the R6 line. I wonder if it's an artifact of the focus motors trying to focus on the super fast moving wings, and then it got extrapolated into the rolling shutter of the sensor.

I assume that you used some denoise processing on the picture int he first post? The jaggedness is definitely enhanced in that one compared to the original.

Can you try to reproduce the jagged effects? What happens when using the full mechanical shutter instead of the electronic shutter?
 
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I think that you were using electronic shutter.
 

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